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I was asked this question at a recent conference and yes, banks do believe that the mass poor are just that: poor.  How do you make a profit out of the poor?  Well, truth be told, the poorest are the most profitable.  They’re the ones who need loans and go overdrawn, and therefore pay all…

Being in New York on International Women’s Day last week, a surprising event occurred.  No, it’s not that Donald Trump renamed the day after his favourite cat, but that a statue appeared next to the Wall Street Bull.  A Fearless Girl.  The bronze statue is sponsored by State Street and celebrates the idea that women…

A summary of the main blogs of the week … The Fast and the Furious I was having a conversation with a friend about the issues at Monzo this week (among others).  Their third-party payments processor had an outage at the weekend so the cards couldn’t be used. Then they had crashes on Android and…

I was having a conversation with a friend about the issues at Monzo this week (among others).  Their third-party payments processor had an outage at the weekend so the cards couldn’t be used. Then they had crashes on Android and lost payments in the app.  It’s a challenge being a challenger.  However, the reason for…

I got a laugh the other day when I referred to Grade II Listed Banks, but I was serious.  For overseas readers, we have a system in Britain of listing heritage buildings.  They have various grades which restrict what you can do with them.  Grade I means you can’t really change the building at all, whilst Grade…

Seven years ago, the first new retail bank in almost a century got its licence to open: Metro Bank.  Now, there are so many new banks starting up in Britain (and across Europe) that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with it all.  There are app-only start-up banks (Atom, Monzo, Starling, Tandem); foreign exchange payment cards (Revolut, SuperCard); personal…

I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles).  Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…

As referenced in my R3 fake news last week, there are various camps out there fighting for the cryptocurrency crown.  The lead runners are bitcoin and Ethereum, and both have serious backing.  However, it’s still early days.  I keep stressing that we need to remember we are experimenting here, and the end game is still…

This week’s main blog headlines are …. The FinTech Wave, Part One I wrote a blog the other day for The Next Web.  I thought it was ok, and it has gained a lot of traction socially. Apparently, people like it and here I’m going to expand upon the basic theme to give a detailed analysis…

I recently blogged about the lack of obvious return on investment for immediate (also called faster, instant or real-time) payments, and mentioned that I would be launching research about this.  Well that research survey is now live.  It will only take you ten minutes, so please join in by clicking this link. Just to put…